Listening Party

Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B, is known for many things: close quarters, cheap drinks, a photo booth, but most of all for its jukebox, which is full of raw R. & B., country, and early rock and roll. Last Monday afternoon, a short man in his sixties wearing oversized sunglasses and a black fedora cocked his ear toward the speaker overhead. “Joe Turner,” he said. “Big Joe.”

The song was “Honey Hush,” a No. 1 R. & B. hit in 1953 for the Kansas City blues shouter. The man was Van Morrison, the Irish singer and songwriter, who was in town to play a pair of shows that week at the WaMu Theatre, at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were recitals of an old record, the 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” But Morrison wanted to talk about even older records. “There was a place in Belfast called Atlantic Records,” he said, his accent strong, his speaking voice lighter than his singing voice. “They imported the stuff from here, actually: jazz records and blues records. I’d go with my father from when I was three.”

Joe Turner had stopped coming out of the jukebox. Now it was the founding fathers of rock and roll, in quick succession: Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Sixty Minute Man,” Chuck Berry with “Tulane,” Bo Diddley’s “Dearest Darling,” Little Richard on “Rip It Up.” Morrison acknowledged each song with a nod. He looked slimmer than he has in the past, and he had long red hair of a hue reminiscent of Sumner Redstone. He sipped tea from a mug, and his press agent brought him a bagel with tuna salad. “The first Little Richard song I heard was ‘Tutti Frutti,’ “ he said. “No, it was the one from the movie ‘The Girl Can’t Help It.’ Little Richard was doing rhythm and blues, but with horns,” Morrison went on. “It was different than Elvis Presley, and so I preferred it. Why would you like Elvis if you had the real stuff? I also preferred Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent. Vincent was different. He was rock and roll, dangerous.”

Morrison mentioned Wynonie Harris, the ribald singer of the late forties and early fifties known as Mr. Blues: “I heard one of his on the radio, on a daytime show. Someone probably played it by accident.” He held forth on Leadbelly: “He did everything from children’s songs to cowboy songs to show tunes.” He talked about the blind harpist Sonny Terry (the first record he ever bought was one of Terry’s), the powerhouse vocalist Bobby Bland, and the skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donegan. When someone grouped Donegan with other practitioners of “pre-Beatles rock and roll,” Morrison pulled up short.

“That’s a cliché,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don’t think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it’s their mythology. The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless.”

Behind Morrison, the press agent was miming a “cut” signal, slicing the air in front of his throat with his hand. He was worried about rush-hour traffic—more specifically, about asking Morrison to sit in the car in rush-hour traffic. “I’m good for more,” Morrison told him, and additional bills were fed into the jukebox. Fats Domino, the subject of Morrison’s highest-charting single, “Domino,” came on with “Careless Love,” his trademark rolling piano already in place in 1951. “I never played piano myself,” Morrison said. “There was a small organ that I used to play in the early sixties, but I don’t think we could afford a piano.”

Morrison—now forty years and nearly forty albums into a solo career—said that he rarely goes to see young bands. “I’ve seen all the people I wanted to see,” he said. “Ray Charles loads of times, James Brown lots of times, Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. Why do I need to keep finding new bands when I have the originals?”

On Monday night, Morrison will be the musical guest for the première of Jimmy Fallon’s late-night TV program. He had not previously heard of Fallon, whose inexperience as a talk-show host he found appealing. “I wouldn’t think he would be so in-a-box,” Morrison said. The music wound down. Sam Cooke sang “Mean Old World.” Morrison stood and went out past the jukebox. ♦